Showing posts with label Rescue Me final season. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rescue Me final season. Show all posts
Monday, August 15, 2011
Best of the Week: 'Crazy Stupid Love,' 'King's Speech,' 'Rescue Me' & Two Books on Controversial Issues
Movies
Crazy Stupid Love: I thoroughly loved seeing Crazy Stupid Love this weekend. It touched me and was emotionally affecting, so much more than an insipid, garden variety romantic comedy.
Steve Carell has again proven that he has acting chops beyond simply making us empathize with his characters’ awkward discomforts or laugh at the insane behavior that his fictional alter egos demonstrate in The Office or Anchorman. As the freshly-dumped and deeply wounded Cal Weaver, a dad of three whose wife of several decades has given him the boot, Carell was vulnerable and not in a ham-handed kind of way. His performance was like eating a big handful of those Sour Skittles you buy in the theater where the boxes are approximately the size of toaster: They’re tart at the beginning (like when Cal was publically moping around in the immediate aftermath of being dumped) and sweet in its core (like when Cal was clandestinely was tending to his backyard under cover of darkness or was recreating an old date with his estranged wife).
Ryan Gosling, who was the slick babe magnet with the uber-chic duds, was enjoyable to watch as well, which surprised me because I figured I’d loathe his character and judge him as smarmy and shallow, an over-cologned empty suit. But, turns out, he wasn’t. For her part, Julianne Moore was subtle and muted yet under-developed, while observing Emma Stone in action was like watching a glass of bubbly champagne come to life.
A grown-up love story that lived up to the critics’ raves, I echo their plaudits (Entertainment Weekly gave it an A) and recommend it to anyone who’s sick of romantic comedies that make you feel as though you have fewer brain cells upon leaving the theater than you did when you walked in.
The King’s Speech: I’ll admit it, I went into watching this Oscar winning film feeling as though I had to complete a homework assignment. Like being forced to read The Crucible.
However the movie turned out to be okay, in fact, better than okay. I was seriously tired when I sat down to watch The King’s Speech and completely expected I’d fall asleep, like I did when I watched The Queen after Helen Mirren won her Oscar for starring in that film. But I stayed awake through the whole thing. (And no, I didn’t use caffeine or other substances to do so.)
Colin Firth definitely earned his Oscar for winning depiction of King George VI heroically working on controlling his speech impediment and rising to the occasion when his country needed him on the cusp of World War II. Firth was just the right combination of intelligent, angry, mortified and courageous. It was an inspiring tale that wasn’t at all a cinematic version of Ambien.
TV
To be honest, I haven’t watched a ton of TV outside of Red Sox games and episodes of Six Feet Under on DVD in preparation to write my contributions to Clique Clack TV’s Six Feet Under Week.
The one currently-airing show that I saw this week which resonated with me was Rescue Me, reviewed here. It was refreshing to see Tommy take charge of things and not screw up, not get drunk, not lose any kids. And nobody died. But the best of all was Sheila stepping up to the plate and saving the reputations of all the guys at her late husband’s firehouse and the members of her family from the nasty campaign of character assassination that was being waged by an ill-intentioned TV reporter trying to carve a career out of someone else’s hide. Sheila’s take-down was a satisfying thing to watch.
Books
While I continued to read the third installment of Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay, I finished Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner and Milkshake by Joanna Weiss, two books which tackled the controversial issues of surrogacy and breastfeeding. (I reviewed them both for ModernMom/Mommy Tracked.)
Both were swift, entertaining reads, although Weiss’ provided sarcastic laughter as it humorously satirized not only the extremists in the pro- and anti-breastfeeding crowds, but also political campaigns which expropriate issues about which they could care less about in an attempt to lure votes.
What did you read/watch this week that you loved or hated?
Image credit: ModernMom.com.
Monday, July 25, 2011
A Week of Pop Culture Goodies: 'HP7,' 'Secretariat,' 'Rescue Me,' 'Weeds' & 2 Comic Collections
Movies
The best film I saw over the course of last week was the final installment of the Harry Potter film series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which moved me, thrilled me and entertained me, flaws and all. While others may nitpick about not liking some of the changes made from J.K. Rowling’s sacred text (which I also adored), not appreciating the climatic Harry-Voldemort death scene, for example, I was okay with all of it. My 12-year-olds, who did indeed like the film, were nonetheless among those nitpickers who couldn’t get past the creative differences between the two works. They reviewed the film with me for CliqueClack Flicks here.
Over the weekend, my daughter and I found ourselves with some spare time, so I decided to check out our On Demand movies and settled upon the film Secretariat based on the true story of Penny Tweedy and her belief that she and her “Big Red” horse could overcome obstacles and sexism and doubt that Secretariat could win the triple crown.
It was eye opening to watch this with my 12-year-old daughter as she was appalled at the naked sexism lobbed at Tweedy as she was patronized and marginalized as a “housewife,” until she proved the boastful boobs wrong. The combination of doing her homework and studying up on the horseracing business, on horses, on the finances and not buying what other people were trying to tell her when she knew they were off base, combined with Tweedy's unshakable faith in her own gut instincts made Tweedy a hero, at least to the gal sitting next to me on the sofa. We need more films like this, more women like Tweedy.
TV
Rescue Me is two episodes into its final season and, thus far, it’s been a weird, yet entertaining ride. Not too hellishly dark, at least not yet, the travails of Tommy Gavin, as he tries to help his oldest daughter remain sober (never mind himself), provide comfort to his fortysomething wife who’s pregnant and to his former lover/his dead cousin’s wife as she struggles with a grown son who sustained horrendous injuries while on the job with Tommy, not to mention the hot button of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 that's fast approaching, have proven quite emotional and, at the same time, oddly amusing.
Another storyline which shows promise, Lou’s struggle with weight loss and his “emotional eating,” which has not only put his own health in danger, but the lives of his colleagues when he rushes into a burning building, physically unfit to help anyone else escape.
My review of the latest episode -- where the main question was whether the Gavin women really run the Gavin family and rule over Tommy’s life was prominent -- is over on CliqueClack TV.
Weeds: I’m not quite sure what I think about the bizarre turns this show has taken. Way back in the beginning, when suburban mom/PTA volunteer Nancy Botwin turned to dealing pot in order to keep her family afloat on the heels of the sudden death of her husband kind of made sense, if you’re of the mind that selling pot’s not a big deal. (It was along the Breaking Bad’s Walter White’s initial thinking: Do what you need to do to protect/help your family.)
Then, as Nancy delved further into the drug trade, she changed. She got that U-Turn tattoo. She started trying to play bad guys off of one another which led to her neighborhood being burned to the ground. She reveled in messing around with a Mexican drug kingpin/politician Esteban, even when he was violent toward her. Her unexpected pregnancy with Esteban's child was the only thing that saved her life and stopped him from murdering her. After a brief reconciliation, which I did not buy, Nancy fled after her middle son killed Esteban’s political ally. After last season, which was spent with the Botwins on the run, we’re into this odd New York City-centered/Nancy-in-a-halfway-house scenario where she’s kicked off a new drug dealing biz when she’s barely out of custody, and is forced to wear a parade around Manhattan in a series of horrific 80s duds that smell like sweat. It’s gone so far off the rails from its original, somewhat plausible conceit, yet I just cannot turn away.
Earlier this month, New York Magazine’s Jillian Goodman wrote a piece entitled, “How Weeds Has Gone Wrong, and How It Could Have Saved Itself.” Among her recommendations: “For this season to turn itself around, we need something newer than a new locale, which can easily become the ground for old mistakes,” Goodman wrote. “It’d be great to see Nancy learn from all the stupid sh*% she’s pulled in the last six seasons and get some real growth. There are only so many times we can see that same old slack-jawed-but-pouty-I’ve-been-caught face before we’re going to change the channel for good.”
Books
I’ve been reading Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and it’s not what I thought it would be. I first heard about this book more than a decade ago in an episode of Once and Again. Former high school bulimic Judy Brooks, now a beautiful, confident book store owner, recommended it to the anorexic Jessie Sammler telling the young teen, “This book saved me.”
Later, when the troubled Jessie was alone in her bedroom, you heard Jessie’s voice-over reading some lines from the book about a young teenage girl that reflected how alienated Jessie feels from her own world, her family and her peers. “With her it was like there were two places – the inside room and the outside room. School and the family and the things that happened every day were in the outside room. . . Foreign countries and plan and music were on the inside room.”
Another excerpt: “She could be in the middle of a house full of people and still feel like she was locked up by herself.”
So I started reading it expecting, well, I don’t know exactly what I was expecting . . . maybe the insightful eloquence of that late, great ABC drama. That’s not exactly what the book turned out to be. It follows a young girl, Mick Kelly, who has connections to other characters who all, like her, feel like societal outcasts, but for very different reasons. It’s a thought-provoking read to be sure, just not the one I thought I was getting into when I cracked it open.
On the flip side of the coin, I was pleased to receive two collections of cartoons from illustrators who truly get the humor of what it’s like to be a work-from-home mother and raise children in the hovering, helicopter nuttiness of now. On the heels of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, I definitely need the laughs of Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup Brace Yourself and Terri Libenson’s Pajama Diaries Déjà To-Do.
Image credits: FX,Comics Kingdom, Stone Soup Comics.
The best film I saw over the course of last week was the final installment of the Harry Potter film series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which moved me, thrilled me and entertained me, flaws and all. While others may nitpick about not liking some of the changes made from J.K. Rowling’s sacred text (which I also adored), not appreciating the climatic Harry-Voldemort death scene, for example, I was okay with all of it. My 12-year-olds, who did indeed like the film, were nonetheless among those nitpickers who couldn’t get past the creative differences between the two works. They reviewed the film with me for CliqueClack Flicks here.
Over the weekend, my daughter and I found ourselves with some spare time, so I decided to check out our On Demand movies and settled upon the film Secretariat based on the true story of Penny Tweedy and her belief that she and her “Big Red” horse could overcome obstacles and sexism and doubt that Secretariat could win the triple crown.
It was eye opening to watch this with my 12-year-old daughter as she was appalled at the naked sexism lobbed at Tweedy as she was patronized and marginalized as a “housewife,” until she proved the boastful boobs wrong. The combination of doing her homework and studying up on the horseracing business, on horses, on the finances and not buying what other people were trying to tell her when she knew they were off base, combined with Tweedy's unshakable faith in her own gut instincts made Tweedy a hero, at least to the gal sitting next to me on the sofa. We need more films like this, more women like Tweedy.
TV
Rescue Me is two episodes into its final season and, thus far, it’s been a weird, yet entertaining ride. Not too hellishly dark, at least not yet, the travails of Tommy Gavin, as he tries to help his oldest daughter remain sober (never mind himself), provide comfort to his fortysomething wife who’s pregnant and to his former lover/his dead cousin’s wife as she struggles with a grown son who sustained horrendous injuries while on the job with Tommy, not to mention the hot button of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 that's fast approaching, have proven quite emotional and, at the same time, oddly amusing.
Another storyline which shows promise, Lou’s struggle with weight loss and his “emotional eating,” which has not only put his own health in danger, but the lives of his colleagues when he rushes into a burning building, physically unfit to help anyone else escape.
My review of the latest episode -- where the main question was whether the Gavin women really run the Gavin family and rule over Tommy’s life was prominent -- is over on CliqueClack TV.
Weeds: I’m not quite sure what I think about the bizarre turns this show has taken. Way back in the beginning, when suburban mom/PTA volunteer Nancy Botwin turned to dealing pot in order to keep her family afloat on the heels of the sudden death of her husband kind of made sense, if you’re of the mind that selling pot’s not a big deal. (It was along the Breaking Bad’s Walter White’s initial thinking: Do what you need to do to protect/help your family.)
Then, as Nancy delved further into the drug trade, she changed. She got that U-Turn tattoo. She started trying to play bad guys off of one another which led to her neighborhood being burned to the ground. She reveled in messing around with a Mexican drug kingpin/politician Esteban, even when he was violent toward her. Her unexpected pregnancy with Esteban's child was the only thing that saved her life and stopped him from murdering her. After a brief reconciliation, which I did not buy, Nancy fled after her middle son killed Esteban’s political ally. After last season, which was spent with the Botwins on the run, we’re into this odd New York City-centered/Nancy-in-a-halfway-house scenario where she’s kicked off a new drug dealing biz when she’s barely out of custody, and is forced to wear a parade around Manhattan in a series of horrific 80s duds that smell like sweat. It’s gone so far off the rails from its original, somewhat plausible conceit, yet I just cannot turn away.
Earlier this month, New York Magazine’s Jillian Goodman wrote a piece entitled, “How Weeds Has Gone Wrong, and How It Could Have Saved Itself.” Among her recommendations: “For this season to turn itself around, we need something newer than a new locale, which can easily become the ground for old mistakes,” Goodman wrote. “It’d be great to see Nancy learn from all the stupid sh*% she’s pulled in the last six seasons and get some real growth. There are only so many times we can see that same old slack-jawed-but-pouty-I’ve-been-caught face before we’re going to change the channel for good.”
Books
Later, when the troubled Jessie was alone in her bedroom, you heard Jessie’s voice-over reading some lines from the book about a young teenage girl that reflected how alienated Jessie feels from her own world, her family and her peers. “With her it was like there were two places – the inside room and the outside room. School and the family and the things that happened every day were in the outside room. . . Foreign countries and plan and music were on the inside room.”
Another excerpt: “She could be in the middle of a house full of people and still feel like she was locked up by herself.”
So I started reading it expecting, well, I don’t know exactly what I was expecting . . . maybe the insightful eloquence of that late, great ABC drama. That’s not exactly what the book turned out to be. It follows a young girl, Mick Kelly, who has connections to other characters who all, like her, feel like societal outcasts, but for very different reasons. It’s a thought-provoking read to be sure, just not the one I thought I was getting into when I cracked it open.
On the flip side of the coin, I was pleased to receive two collections of cartoons from illustrators who truly get the humor of what it’s like to be a work-from-home mother and raise children in the hovering, helicopter nuttiness of now. On the heels of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, I definitely need the laughs of Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup Brace Yourself and Terri Libenson’s Pajama Diaries Déjà To-Do.
Image credits: FX,Comics Kingdom, Stone Soup Comics.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Notes on Pop Culture: What Are You Looking Forward to Seeing This Summer?
Harry Potter, Harry Potter, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.
The end of the series chronicling the exploits of The Boy Who Lived hits the big screen on July 15, and I plan on enjoying it in the theaters with my Potter-crazed kids, whom my husband and I are taking to Orlando this summer to visit Universal Studios’ the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. (I don’t know who’s more excited about it, them or me.) This is the BIG film to which I’m looking forward to seeing in those slow months, pop culture-wise.
TV-wise, other than Red Sox games, there are a few shows I intend to view this summer. (You can find the summer TV schedule here.)
I’m going to catch the final, gut-wrenching season of Denis Leary’s Rescue Me on FX, which starts on July 12 and will conclude right before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, sure to be a poignant moment for this series which rose from the debris and emotional wreckage of that horrific day.
The subtle and moving Ray Romano/TNT drama Men of a Certain Age returns with the second half of its second season on June 1. I’ve grown to really admire the way the three lead characters depict the disappointment they feel about where they are as they arrive at mid-life and try to figure out whether they should do something about their disappointment or just give in to it.
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| Image credit |
Speaking of drugs . . . I’ll be setting my DVR to record new episodes of Showtime’s Weeds, which’ll be starting its seventh season on June 27. Though this show has had its ups and downs, I’m intrigued, now that Nancy Botwin has surrendered herself to the authorities, where it’ll go next. Perhaps it’ll enjoy a creative renaissance like Grey’s Anatomy did in its seventh season.
If you’re an Alias/spy genre fan, USA’s Covert Affairs, whose second season starts on June 7, is like Alias-lite. It’s set in D.C., has a light-hearted streak and isn’t excessively complex like some of the other spy shows out there as it follows the journey of Annie Walker, a new CIA agent.
Another item on my pop culture agenda this summer: Watching the first two seasons of CBS' The Mentalist on DVD with my eldest son. We started watching this show together this past winter, about halfway through the third season, culminating with The Mentalist’s fantastic season finale. Now we want to go back and gather some backstory, just me and my eldest boy child.
What movie and/or TV shows are you looking forward to?
Image credit: AMC.
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